A bill that would exempt major retailers from a portion of California's landmark environmental protection law is speeding through the Legislature in the final hours of its 2009-10 session, circumventing normal public review.

Assembly Bill 1581, which would waive environmental review when a retailer is moving into an existing building, is buried in a crowded docket of bills headed for votes today, the final day for legislation to be passed and sent to the governor. The bill represents the latest example of how special interests have managed to hijack the legislative process, a pattern exposed in Mercury News articles last month.

The newspaper reported that in the last session of the Legislature, bills written by outside interests -- known in legislative parlance as "sponsors" -- made up 39 percent of all bills introduced. Bills sponsored by private interests -- such as the California Retailers Association, which sponsored AB 1581 -- were more than twice as likely to become law than those with no sponsor.

Assemblyman Jared Huffman, D-Marin, said in an interview Monday that the retailers' bill is a major attack on the California Environmental Quality Act: "With this absurd bill, the message it sends is that CEQA is now for sale, that anyone who can afford to hire a team of lobbyists and grease the wheels in the Legislature can have their own special exception to our most important environmental law."

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Just one year ago, the Legislature passed a bill to exempt a potential football stadium in the City of Industry from CEQA, the first legislation to do so, despite warnings from opponents that the state was setting a dangerous precedent that would open the door to eviscerating the law's environmental safeguards.

The latest bill, introduced by Assemblywoman Norma Torres, D-Ontario, would permit retailers moving into empty space of up to 120,000 square feet to avoid the public review process under CEQA, which requires consideration of the traffic, noise and other environmental impacts of a project. The bill provides no room for legal challenges, and the costs to ease any impacts would fall on taxpayers, not the developer.

"We are worsening an already slippery slope created with last year's stadium exemption," said Huffman, the former chairman of the Assembly's committee on natural resources.

Supporters contend that the bill is a necessary tool to give the economy a jolt. The bill took its current form only last week, the last day for bills to be amended, state records show. Until then, AB 1581 was focused on helping promote recycling and had no outside sponsor listed.

But on Aug. 20, using a process known in the Legislature as "gut and amend," the bill changed and a sponsor appeared: the California Retailers Association, an influential trade group representing retailers that operate more than 9,000 stores and generate more than $100 billion annually in the state.

Inside the halls of the Capitol it has been dubbed "The Walmart Bill." The lobbyist working AB 1581, Bob Giroux, represents Walmart, which has spent $246,750 since last year on his firm, Lang, Hansen, O'Malley & Miller. Garrick Brown, a retail industry analyst with Colliers International, said the bill's parameters fit perfectly with Walmart's most recent expansion efforts. Notably, the maximum size for stores that are exempted from review -- 120,000 square feet -- is precisely Walmart's typical footprint.

"Their big emphasis now has been to shift from ground-up development to leasing existing vacant space," Brown said. Such space tends to be cheaper and often a better fit for the most profitable segment of its product line: groceries.

The California bill "would be huge for them," Brown said.

A Walmart spokesperson said in an e-mail: "As a member of the CA Retailers Association, we are supportive of their work on a number of issues that help boost local economies and create jobs, including this one."

By making such a late amendment, the bill's sponsor avoided the normal scrutiny that comes from extensive committee reviews and repeated readings in both houses of the Legislature in the course of normal bill passage.

Bill Dombrowski, the association's president, said the bill is not a sneak attack. His group has spent the past year trying to ease state environmental law to get vacant retail space occupied. He added that talks with a sympathetic Assembly speaker, John Pérez, led to the last-minute bill.

Dombrowski described the bill "as good public policy," adding, "we need to do something to get this economy going," and he said comparisons with the NFL stadium bill are unfair. The Torres bill, if passed, would require new exempted tenants to increase energy efficiency and reduce water consumption.

Incoming businesses would have to comply with local land use and zoning laws. And the bill would sunset by the end of 2013, a key element for bill supporter Sen. Joe Simitian, D-Palo Alto, who has vigorously opposed bending CEQA rules in the past.

"The three-year sunset was critical," said Simitian, who holds a master's degree in city planning. "But there are no adverse impacts to the environment from this bill."

But opponents are outraged by the bill. For a full year, the Legislature rejected attempts by the governor and Republican legislators to expand CEQA exemptions in the wake of the NFL stadium bill.

And the legislative staffer for the Senate Environmental Quality Committee who analyzed the bill's latest language raised numerous red flags. Among them, he said the bill could stick local taxpayers with the expense of cleaning up the environmental damage of new projects, given that the developer would be exempt from many mitigation requirements and free from lawsuit threats.